Four Months Afoot in Spain Part 4

My evening meal consisted of a _gazpacho_, olives, eggs, cherries, blood-dripping pomegranates, a rich brown bread, and wine; my couch of a straw mattress in a corner of the great kitchen--and my reckoning was barely twelve cents.

Afoot with the dawn, I had soon entered the vast cork forest that covers all the northern slope of the sierra. Wherever a siding offered, stood long rows of open freight cars piled high with bales of the spongy bark; the morning "mixto" hobbled by bearing southward material seemingly sufficient to stop all the bottles in Christendom.

By rail Ronda was still a long day distant--but not afoot. Before the morning was old I came upon the beginning of the short-cut which my hosts of the night had described. It straggled uncertainly upward for a time across a rolling sandy country k.n.o.bbed with tufts of withered gra.s.s and overspread with mammoth cork-trees, some still unbarked, some standing stark naked in the blistering sun. Then all at once, path, sand and vegetation ceased, and above me stretched to the very heavens the grilling face of a bare rock. I mounted zigzagging, as up the slate roof of some gigantic church, swathed in a heat that burned through the very soles of my shoes. A mile up, two guardias civiles emerged suddenly from a fissure, the sun glinting on their muskets and polished black three-cornered hats. Here, then, of all places, was to be my first meeting with these officious fellows, whose inquisitiveness was reported the chief drawback to a tramp in Spain. But they greeted me with truly Spanish politeness, even cordiality. Only casually, when we had chatted a bit, as is wont among travelers meeting on the road, did one of them suggest:

"You carry, no doubt, senor, your personal papers?"

I dived into my shirt--my knapsack, and drew out my pa.s.sport. The officers admired it a moment side by side without making so bold as to touch it, thanked me for privilege, raised a forefinger to their hats, and stalked on down the broiling rock.

A full hour higher I brought up against a sheer precipice. Of the town that must be near there was still not a trace. For some time longer I marched along the foot of the cliff, swinging half round a circle and always mounting. Then all at once the impregnable wall gave way, a hundred white stone houses burst simultaneously on my sight, and I entered a city seething in the heat of noonday.

CHAPTER III

THE LAST FOOTHOLD OF THE MOOR

Ronda crouches on the bald summit of a rock so mighty that one can easily fancy it the broken base of some pillar that once upheld the sky.

Nature seems here to have established division of labor. The gigantic rock bearing aloft the city sustains of itself not a sprig of vegetation. Below, so far below that Ronda dares even in summer to fling down unburied the mutilated carca.s.ses from her bullring, spreads the encircling _vega_, producing liberally for the mult.i.tude above, but granting foothold scarcely to a peasant's hovel. Beyond and round about stretches the sierra, having for its task to shelter the city against prowling storms and to enrich the souls of her inhabitants with its rugged grandeur.

Travelers come to Ronda chiefly to gaze elsewhere. As an outlook upon the world she is well worth the coming; as a city she is almost monotonous, with her squat, white-washed houses sweltering in the omnivorous sunshine. Her only "sight" is the _Tajo_, the "gash" in the living rock like the mark of some powerful woodman's ax in the top of a tree-stump. A stork-legged bridge spans it, linking two unequal sections of the town, which without this must be utter strangers. A stream trickles along its bottom, how deep down one recognizes only when he has noted how like toy buildings are the grist-mills that squat beside it pilfering their power.

Elsewhere within the town the eyes wander away to the enclosing mountains. The wonder is not that her inhabitants are dreamy-eyed; rather that they succeed at intervals in shaking off the spell of nature's setting to play their roles in life's prosaic drama. As for myself, I rambled through her piping streets for half the afternoon because she is Spanish, and because my supply of currency was falling low. Ronda boasts no bank. Her chief dry-goods merchant, however--by what right my informant could not guess--boasts himself a banker. I found the amateur financier at home, which chanced to be distant the height of one short stairway from his place of business. When I had chatted an hour or two with his clerks, the good man himself appeared, rosy with the exertions of the siesta, and examined the ten-dollar check with many expressions of grat.i.tude for the opportunity.

"We shall take pleasure," he said, "in liquidating this obligation. You will, of course, bring persons of my acquaintance to establish your ident.i.ty, como es costumbre in large financial transactions?"

I had never so fully realized how convincing was my command of Spanish as when I had succeeded within an hour in convincing this bond-slave of "costumbre" that express-checks are designed to avoid just this difficulty. He expressed a desire to examine the doc.u.ment more thoroughly and retired with it to the depths of his establishment.

Toward evening he returned with pen and ink-horn.

"I accept the obligation," he announced, "and shall pay you fifty-seven pesetas, according to yesterday's quotation on the Borsa. But I find I have such a sum on hand only in coppers."

"Which would weigh," I murmured, after the necessary calculation, "something over thirty pounds. You will permit me, senor, to express my deep grat.i.tude--and to worry along for the time being with the money in pocket."

Travelers who arraign Honda for lack of creature comforts can never have been a.s.signed the quarters a peseta won me for the night in the "Parador de Vista Hermosa." The room was a house in itself, peculiarly clean and home-like, and furnished not only with the necessities of bed, chairs, and taper-lighted effigy of the Virgin, but with table, washstand, and even a bar of soap, the first I had seen in the land except that in my own knapsack. When the sun had fallen powerless behind the sierra, I drew the green reed shade and found before my window a little _rejaed_ balcony hanging so directly over the Tajo that the b.u.t.t of a cigarette fell whirling down, down to the very bottom of the gorge. I dragged a chair out into the dusk and sat smoking beneath the star-sprinkled sky long past a pedestrian's bedtime, the unbroken music of the Guadalvin far below ascending to mingle with the murmur of the strolling city.

To the north of Ronda begins a highway that goes down through a country as arid and rock-strewn as the anti-Lebanon. Here, too, is much of the Arab's contempt for roads. Donkeys bearing singing men tripped by along hard-beaten paths just far enough off the public way to be no part of it. Now and again donkey and trail rambled away independently over the thirsty hills, perhaps to return an hour beyond, more often to be swallowed up in the unknown. The untraveled carretera lay inches deep in fine white dust. Far and near the landscape was touched only with a few slight patches of viridity. The solitary tree under which I tossed through an hour of siesta cast the stringy, wavering shade of a bean-pole.

Sharp-eyed with appet.i.te, I came near, nevertheless, to pa.s.sing unseen early in the afternoon a village hidden in plain sight along the flank of a reddish, barren hill. In this, too, Andalusia resembles Asia Minor; her hamlets are so often of the same colored or colorless rocks as the hills on which they are built as frequently to escape the eye. I forded a bone-dry brook and climbed into the tumbled _pueblo_. Toward the end of the princ.i.p.al lack of a street one of the crumbling hovel-fronts was scrawled in faded red, with the Spaniard's innocent indistinction between the second and twenty-second letters of the alphabet:

[Ill.u.s.tration: Aqui se bende bino]

Once admitted to the sleepy interior, I regaled myself on bread, cheese, and "bino" and scrambled back to the highway. It wandered more and more erratically, slinking often around hills that a bit of exertion would have surmounted. I recalled the independence of the donkeys and, picking up a path at an elbow of the route, struck off across the rugged country.

But there is sound truth, as in all his venerable if somewhat baggy-kneed proverbs, in the Spaniard's a.s.sertion that "no hay atajo sin trabajo." In this short-cut there was work and to spare. As long as the day lasted the way continued stiff and stony, ceaselessly mounting or descending, with never a level of breathing-s.p.a.ce breadth nor a moment's respite from the rampant sunshine. A few times I stumbled upon an inhabited heap of stones in a fold of the hills. Man, at least fully clothed, seemed never before to have strayed thus far afield. From each hutch poured forth a s.h.a.ggy fellow with his draggled mate and a flock of half-naked children, all to stare speechlessly after me as long as the crown of my hat remained in sight.

The highway had deserted me entirely. As darkness came on, the dimming outline of the cragged hills rising on either hand carried the thoughts more than ever back to the savage, Bedouin-skulking solitudes of Asia Minor. Long after these, too, had blended into the night I stumbled on.

At length there fell on my ear the distant dismal howling of dogs. I pressed forward, and when the sound had grown to a discordant uproar plunged, stick in hand, into a chaos of buildings jumbled together on a rocky ridge,--the village of Penarruria.

The twisting, shoulder-broad channels between the predelugian hovels were strewn with cobblestones, no two of equal size or height, but all polished icy smooth. I sprawled and skated among them, a prey to embarra.s.sment for my clumsiness, until my confusion was suddenly dispelled by the pleasure of seeing a native fall down, a buxom girl of eighteen who suffered thus for her pride in putting on shoes. Throughout the town these were rare, and stockings more so.

The _venta_ into which I straggled at last was the replica of an Arabic _khan_, as ancient as the days of Tarik. It consisted of a covered barnyard court surrounded by a vast corridor, with rock arches and pillars, beneath which mules, _borricos_, and a horse or two were munching. One archway near the entrance was given over to human occupation. The _posadero_ grumbled at me a word of greeting; his wife snarled interminably over her pots and jars in preparing me a meager supper. Now and again as I ate, an _arriero_ arrived and led his animal through the dining-room to the stable. I steeled myself to endure a rough and stony night.

When I had sipped the last of my wine, however, the hostess, sullen as ever, mounted three stone steps in the depth of the archway and lighted me into a room that was strikingly in contrast with the dungeon-like inn proper. The chamber was neatly, even daintily furnished, the walls decorated college-fashion with pictures of every size and variety, the tile floor carpeted with a thick rug, the bed veiled with lace curtains.

It was distinctly a feminine room; and as I undressed the certainty grew upon me that I had dispossessed for the night the daughter of the house, who had turned out to be none other than that maid whose pride-shod downfall had so relieved my embarra.s.sment. Evidently the venta of Penarruria afforded no other accommodations befitting a guest who could squander more than a half peseta for a mere night's lodging.

Over the head of the bed, framed in flowers and the dust-dry memento of Palm Sunday, was a chromo misrepresentation of the Virgin, beneath which flickered a wick floating in oil. I was early trained to sleep in darkness. When I had endured for a long half-hour the dancing of the light on my eyelids, I rose to blow it out, and sank quickly into slumber.

I had all but finished my coffee and wedge of black bread next morning when a double shriek announced that my forgotten sacrilege had been discovered. The modern vestal virgins, in the persons of the posadera and her now barefoot daughter, charged fire-eyed out of my erstwhile quarters and swooped down upon me like two lineal descendants of the Grecian Furies. I mustered such expression of innocence and fearlessness as I was able and listened in silence. They exhausted in time their stock of blistering adjectives and dashed together into the street publishing their grievance to all Penarruria. Gradually the shrill voices died away in the contorted village, and with them my apprehension of figuring in some modern auto da fe. As I was picking up my knapsack, however, an urchin burst in upon me shouting that the guardia civil thereby summoned me into his presence.

"Ha," thought I, "Spain has merely grown more up-to-date in dealing with heretics."

The officer was not to be avoided. He sat before a building which I must pa.s.s to escape from the town; a deep-eyed man who manipulated his cigarette with one hand while he slowly ran the fingers of the other through the only beard, perhaps, in all the dreaded company of which he was a member. His greeting, however, was cordial, almost diffident. In fact, the cause of my summons was quite other than I had apprehended.

Having learned my nationality from the inn register, he had made so bold as to hope that I would delay my departure long enough to give him a cigarette's worth of information concerning the western hemisphere.

"I have resigned from the guardia," he said in explanation of his un-Spanish curiosity, "and in three months I go to make cigars in your Tampa, in la Florida. Spain can no longer feed her children."

I sketched briefly the life in the new world, not forgetting to picture some of the hardships such a change must bring a man of the fixed habits of forty, and took leave of him with the national benediction.

For some hours I trudged on across a country similar to that of the day before. The heat was African. The Spanish summer resembles an intermittent fever; with nightfall comes an inner a.s.surance that the worst is over, and infallibly with the new day the blazing sun sends down its rays seemingly more fiercely than before. The reflection of how agreeable would be a respite from its fury was weaving itself into my thoughts when I swooped suddenly down upon a railway at a hamlet named Gobantes. I had no hope of covering all Spain afoot. Away among the hills to the north the whistle of a locomotive that moment sounded.

I turned aside to the station and bought a ticket to Malaga.

The train squirmed away through howling, arid mountains, abounding in tunnels and tumbled bottomless gorges; then descending headlong to the plain, landed me at the seaport in mid-afternoon. Even Malaga on the seash.o.r.e suffers from the heat. Her Alameda was thick in dust as an Andalusian highway; beneath the choking trees that bordered it the stone benches were blistering to the touch. The excursion was rewarded, however, if by nothing more than the mighty view of the sail-flecked Mediterranean from the summit of the Gibilfaro, reached by a dripping climb through shifting rubble and swarms of begging gypsy children.

Africa was visible, dimly but unmistakably. Below simmered the city, unenlivened by a single touch of green; to the right the vega stretched floor-level to the foot of the treeless Alhama. Directly beneath me, like some vast tub, yawned the bullring, empty now but for a score of boys playing at "torero," flaunting their jackets in the face of an urchin fitted with paper horns, and dashing in pretended terror for the barrier when he turned upon them. The ascent of the Gibilfaro must certainly be forbidden on Sunday afternoons. From this height the struggle in the arena, visible in its entirety, yet purged by distance of its unpleasing details, would be a scene more impressive than from the best seat in the tribunes.

When I reached the station next morning the platform gate was locked and the train I had hoped to take was legally departed. A railway hanger-on, in rags and hemp sandals, however, climbed the iron picket fence and shouted a word to the engineer. Then beckoning to me to follow, he trotted back into the building and rapped authoritatively on the closed window of the ticket-office.

"Senor," he said, as the agent looked out upon us, "be kind enough to sell this caballero a ticket."

"The train is gone," answered the agent.

"Not so, senor," replied the bundle of rags haughtily; "I am having it held that this cavalier may take it."

"Ah, very well," responded the official; and having sold me the ticket, he handed to the hanger-on the key to the platform gate. As I pa.s.sed through it the latter held out his hand, into which I dropped a copper.

"Muchisimas gracias, caballero," he said, bowing profoundly, "and may your grace forever travel with G.o.d."

It was noon when I descended at Bobadilla, the sand-swept junction where all southern Spain changes cars. The train to Granada was soon jolting away to the eastward. Within the third-cla.s.s compartment the heat was flesh-smelting. The bare wooden cell, of the size of a piano-crate, was packed not merely to its lawful and unreasonable capacity of ten persons, but with all the personal chattels under which nine of those persons had been able to totter down to the station. Between the two plank benches, that danced up and down so like the screen of a threshing machine as to deceive the blind man beside me into the ludicrous notion that the train was moving rapidly, was heaped a cart-load. To attempt an inventory thereof would be to name everything bulky, unpleasing, and sharp-cornered that ever falls into the possession of the Spanish peasant. Suffice it to specify that at the summit of the heap swayed a crate of chickens whose cackling sounded without hint of interruption from Bobadilla to the end of the journey.

The national characteristics of third-cla.s.s are clearly marked. Before a French train is well under way two men are sure to fall into some heated dispute, to which their companions give undivided but speechless attention. The German rides in moody silence; the Italian babbles incessantly of nothing. An Englishman endures a third-cla.s.s journey frozen-featured as if he were striving to convince his fellows that he has been thus reduced for once because he has bestowed his purse on the worthy poor. But the truly democratic Spaniard settles down by the compartmentful into a cheery family. Not one of my fellow-sufferers but had some reminiscence to relate, not a question arose to which each did not offer his frank opinion. He who descended carried away with him the benediction of all; the newcomer became in a twinkling a full-fledged member of the impromptu brotherhood.

Nine times I was fervently entreated to partake of a traveler's lunch, and my offer to share my own afternoon nibble was as many times declined with wishes for good appet.i.te and digestion. Travelers who a.s.sure us that this custom inherited from the Moor has died out in Spain are in error; it is dead only among foreigners in first-cla.s.s carriages and tourist hotels--who never had it. The genuine Spaniard would sooner slap his neighbor in the face than to eat before him without begging him to share the repast.

We halted more than frequently. On each such occasion there sounded above the last screech of the brakes the drone of a guard announcing the length of the stay. Little less often the traveler in the further corner of the compartment squirmed his way to the door and departed.

With a sigh of relief the survivors divided the s.p.a.ce equitably between them--and were incontinently called upon to yield it up again as some dust-cloaked peasant flung his bag of implements against my legs with a cheery "buenas tardes" and climbed in upon us.

Then came the task of again getting the train under way. The brisk "all aboard" of our own land would be unbearably rude to the gentle Spanish ear. Whence every station, large or small, holds in captivity a man whose only duty in life seems to be that of announcing the departure of trains. He is invariably tattered, sun-bleached, and sandal-footed, with the general appearance of one whom life has used not unkindly but confounded roughly. How each station succeeds in keeping its announcer in the pink of dilapidation is a Spanish secret. But there he is, without fail, and when the council of officials has at length concluded that the train must depart, he patters noiselessly along the edge of the platform, chanting in a music weird, forlorn, purely Arabic, a phrase so rhythmic that no printed words can more than faintly suggest it: